The techniques described herein relate to providing supplies and/or equipment to a destination location while minimizing the number of humans playing an active role in the acts of loading, delivery, and unloading.
Transporting supplies, provisions, equipment or any cargo is crucial in a wide variety of situations. For example, military resupply refers to the entire journey taken to bring supplies to troops in the field. There may arise situations where it is dangerous for human operators to be either in the transportation vehicle or at the loading and unloading stations, collectively referred to as base stations. For example, military resupply may be vulnerable to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or other various attacks on the vehicle or the base stations. In situations where the vehicle is a helicopter, the job of loading and unloading cargo from a load line attached to the helicopter is inherently dangerous because it may require a team of humans to work underneath a hovering helicopter while a load line, potentially carrying heavy cargo, swings freely.
The same dangers exist while, for example, transporting supplies in the case of natural disaster relief or industrial applications such as transporting felled trees in the logging industry. In the case of transporting felled trees using helicopter in the logging industry, injuries to the ground crew doing the loading and/or unloading are frequent and undesirable.